Ethos, Assessment, and the Value of Work: a Call to Repurpose
by Lael Ewy
The assessment was born of mass alienation. If you know what you’re doing, if you know your craft, your art, your field of study, you know if you’re doing well or not. Assessment makes no sense outside of education or an industrial culture in which those actually invested and involved in the process of making and doing don’t “need” to have a complete understanding, or even a basic understanding, of that process or its final result. As Matthew B. Crawford has pointed out, there is an ethic of doing that comes from an intimate knowledge of the tools and the techniques of the job. It is to this ethos that I suggest we return. When the company owns your labor, it also owns your interest in that labor, in the quality of the work and the values invested in the process. Thus “labor” becomes a commodity outside of the actual job instead of integral to the task. Marx understood this as a foundational principle, but few collectivist schemes have been able to reinvest it in the activities of the people. That is because it is inherent not to capitalism as Marx suggested but to industrialism: large scale production separates work from product and expertise from process. It creates fictive worlds in which things are created and services delivered outside of the scale of individual agency: we can see how we fit the nut to the bolt, but we can’t see how the machine really works, where the resources are gathered, how the marketing gets made. Those forms of collectivism that have succeeded have done so within the confines of traditional and often religiously-bound communities, such as the Hutterites, whose faith calls them to the tasks but whose understanding of the roles of each within the whole keeps them tied together and satisfied. It feels good to do good work. It feels good to see how what you do is beneficial to those you count your own. Even quite simple assembly-line tasks can be reinfused with the notions of ownership and craft, and this is where management can play a role, but managers themselves must also become reinvested in their own roles. No matter what, the larger understanding of how one’s actions affect the overall task must not merely be allowed but encouraged. Part of the task of the company must be the continual education of its employees, much of which must happen by the employees for each other. Because the labor of the worker is the property of the company, intellectual and ethical investment with the product of service must also be accompanied by literal investment in the company; labor must also mean an actual share in the enterprise. Too long have executives purposefully and often maliciously enhanced the alienation of the laborer by denying her her share in the overall endeavor. It is easier, after all, to get rid of a worker who has been convinced, and who has convinced herself, that her time there is worth only her time and not her hopes, much less her heart and sweat and soul. Too many companies are like the current Hawker-Beech in Wichita, which went from a family-run airplane company to one that no one seems to really own, no matter one’s position within it or the value of one’s stock. So distanced are the principals from the task that the product line has stagnated, the traditions fallen fallow, the executives baffled when their latest ploys have failed. When the worker is not merely entitled to stop the line when she sees a flaw float by but feels an urgent need, when she anticipates how that flaw will happen given the conditions, the resources, the processes in place, then assessments will be redundant and production again a worthwhile endeavor: an act of creation and not a mere set of actions within a set of procedures set against the stone hearts of an industry’s distant and disinterested captains. 57 Theoretical Band Namesby Hillary Hardcore and EW Wilder 1.Lo-Cajun From Actual Student Papersby EW Wilder College students are, by and large, dedicated and hardworking. But once in a while, haste, panic, and auto-correct conspire to create something funny. A few of those things you’ll find below:
Autonomy, Agency, Liberty, Freedom, and Responsibilityby Lael Ewy At some level, we all want agency and autonomy. Individuals want them; governments, NGOs, and businesses want these as well. We might call some formulation of autonomy and agency “freedom,” a word that has been abused almost to the degree that “love” has been. “Liberty” might be a better word, with its associations with throwing off tyranny and its deeper resonances with the liberal arts—the skills we need to practice agency and autonomy. But this word, too, has been stretched around specific civil liberties, “libertarianism,” and the like, and is trending toward the uselessness “freedom” has taken on. “Agency and autonomy” more clearly and completely express what I mean, and they better reflect what people desire when pursuing “freedom” however expressed. We like being able to do things and seeing that action make an impact in our world. We like to have power over our decisions, to not be coerced or forced by circumstance to do things. We like the feeling of some degree of control over our destinies. We can align agency and autonomy along traditional notions: autonomy = “freedom from,” and agency = “freedom to.” The problems arise when we exercise agency and autonomy in ways that negatively impact others’ lives. The most basic cases are of the “freedom to swing my arm ending where your nose begins” types and need not be enumerated here. Things get more complicated when the damage is not quite so obvious, when the damage is collective, when the damage takes place over time, or when the dangerous behaviors are part of a system we rely on for other basic needs like shelter, safety, and food. Pollution and environmental degradation provide ready real-world applications of these problems. Oil spills, for instance, are readily seen, but other types can be more insidious: water pollution, air pollution, contamination of food often show up first as symptoms rather than visible effects. These problems can be long-term and cumulative: carcinogens can take many years to sicken us and may not affect everyone equally. And the collective impact can be dire: by the time systemic harm is done to a population or an ecosystem, it is often too late to “fix” the problem. Forms of accountability in these cases require regulation and monitoring, and those things impinge on the agency and autonomy of those engaged (and often enriched) by the dangerous activity. And so our notions of political liberty clash with our ability to live safe, healthy lives in a clean and productive environment. But, of course, the polluting activities are often tied to the immediate livelihoods of those engaged in them: we rely on industry and fossil-fuels to give us remunerative work and to power our civilization. Put in terms of “liberty,” we see few options other than to continue as we are; the “freedoms” we enjoy, such as driving where we want to and being employed seem to depend on maintaining the status quo, and the “freedom” of the industry to continue as it always has therefore seems an affront to our basic rights. If we parse things out in terms of agency and autonomy, though, we can begin to see our way to the third element, which is responsibility. If we are completely autonomous, we have no one to rely on but ourselves when the consequences are dire. But we also must acknowledge that we are fallible beings, prone to error. To assume the capability of full responsibility is also to assume either omniscience or self-destruction. One is absurd and the other untenable. Likewise, complete agency assumes omnipotence and total unaccountability: the ability to act without restriction either physical or social. This is physically impossible, of course, but it is also limited by our social situation. We have already seen cases of reasonable social restriction: when harm is caused to one’s person. But we must also acknowledge that our actions can sometimes hamper others’ agency and autonomy. I become less able, for instance, to ply my trade as a shoe salesman when Wal-Mart moves to town and is able to undercut my prices. My autonomy of movement is restricted by others’ ability to put fences around their property. But we are also faced with other restrictions: my ability to ply my trade of poet is restricted by the cultural reliance on the idea of market value, and so I must pursue other work to support my writing habit. Right now, some 30 million people find their ability to act with agency within their chosen professions is hampered by our reliance on an ailing economic system. The manner in which we formulate agency and autonomy is determined by culture; in fact, a major feature of a culture is what the people who comprise it consider necessary or worthwhile to do and what of that is up to discretion and what is a matter of compulsion. Responsibility is only meaningful within this framework, and is renegotiated when the cultural environment, or when the environment within which a culture exists, changes. “Taking care of yourself and those you love” looks very different in a hunter-gatherer society than it does in a modern industrial society or in whatever society we’re becoming. As we become that new society, it behooves us to be intentional about how we practice agency and what autonomy we find proper. No culture can function unless the majority of people agree on that relationship. To botch that renegotiation is to make the suffering of the last few years look like relative luxury.
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